vertical-workflows

vertical-workflows is a skill for Claude Code from kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg. It costs 133 tokens per session (2,890 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for writing Claude Code workflows that send many similar work items to subagents in parallel.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design workflows for processing many chunks, rules, or slides, including the work list, event log, worker tasks, cross-check stage, and returned summary.
Why use it?
It keeps intermediate results out of the main conversation and supports large fan-out tasks with a final cross-check and summary.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the john plugin — 28 skills, 5 commands, 5 agents, 3 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to design workflows for processing many chunks, rules, or slides…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg/vertical-workflows
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg --skill vertical-workflows
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install john, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 28 skills, 5 commands, 5 agents, 3 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for vertical-workflows

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg/vertical-workflows.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg/vertical-workflows)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg/vertical-workflows"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg/vertical-workflows.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 133 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,890 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00133 $0.02890
Opus 5 $0.00067 $0.01445
Sonnet 5 $0.00027 $0.00578
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00289

Measured 7d ago against content hash e09c66432d32, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vertical-workflows scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/joharnessburg/skills/vertical-workflows/SKILL.md · 123 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 123 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

vertical-workflows

A dynamic workflow is a JavaScript script the Claude Code runtime executes in the background. You describe the work; you write the script with your Workflow tool; the runtime fans out subagents (up to 16 at once, 1,000 per run), keeps every intermediate result in script variables instead of your context, and hands you back only the final summary.

For John, that is the vertical axis — the hundreds-to-thousands of knowledge entries that each need the same kind of work, done in parallel. Until now you walked down each column by hand, placing one subagent at a time and holding every report in your own context. Past a few dozen entries your context floods. A workflow turns the whole column into an assembly line you write once.

This skill teaches the shape of a John workflow, not the workflow API. You already have the Workflow tool and know its JavaScript surface; what you need from John is what a John-shaped fan-out looks like — where the work-list comes from, how workers wire to the event log, what the cross-check stage checks, and what to return. Map that shape onto the live API yourself.

The one idea that makes this safe: engine vs truth

John already separates what's on disk (truth) from how the agent produced it (execution). The vertical axis writes per-entry events to <project>/.john/events/<phase>/, and reduce_events.py folds them into <project>/.john/checkpoints/<phase>/state.json. You never trust a tool-call assertion; you read the checkpoint.

A workflow is just a new execution engine under that contract:

  • The workflow keeps results in variables for speed and a clean context.
  • But its worker agents still write events to .john/events/<phase>/ — the same files inline subagents write.
  • After the run, you still run reduce_events.py and read the checkpoint. That is truth, not the script's return value.

This is why adoption is low-risk: nothing below the execution line changes. Same events, same reducer, same PLAN.md. See [[event-log-and-reducer]].

Read the full file on GitHub · 123 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 123 lines · 133 tokens per session scan A e09c66432d32

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vertical-workflows is a skill published in the GitHub repository kitchen-engineer42/joharnessburg (9 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 133 tokens to every session and 2,890 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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